Post navigation

The best kale salad your will ever make!

Disclaimer – At some point in your life you may make a better kale salad than this one, but if you do I want to hear about it!

I am lucky, I have always liked salads. Seriously. I was the 8-year old asking the waitress/er if I could substitute the fries that came with my burger for a side salad. The server would look at my parents like “is this kid for real?”, and they would just smile and approve the order. And if there were green beans around, forget about it! I couldn’t get enough!

I realize I am lucky to have been born liking vegetables, I know it is very much not the case for everyone. My love of the leafy greens was incredibly helpful at first when I cut dairy out of my diet, and then when I did the Whole 30. I was completely happy and satiated with my proteins and a side of salad, sautéed spinach or roasted kale.

It is weird to think of a salad as a treat, but this salad is totally a treat to me. It is crunchy, chewy, sweet, tart and salty all at once. You can make a giant bowl and enjoy it for the entire week, or eat it all at once…which may or may not be what happened to my giant portion of this salad.

The sweet, chewiness comes from the dried cranberries in the salad. During Whole 30, one of the biggest lessons I learned was about reading labels and the hidden sugars added to almost every food. One of the habits I have tried to keep post-Whole 30, is to limit foods with these added sugars. Have you ever read the label on your dried fruit? They are all LOADED with added sugar! Why?! Fruit is sweet and delicious on its own, and only becomes more so when it is dried or dehydrated. For this salad, I really wanted to find dried cranberries with no added sugar. I looked everywhere, and was about to lose hope, but then Whole Foods came to the rescue with these apple juice sweetened cranberries. Score!

Read your labels people, weird things are lurking in all of our foods…except for in this kale salad. This kale salad is perfect in every way!